Tuesday, July 31, 2012

If you want to reduce your stress all you have do is smile. If
you don’t feel the feeling, do it anyway. Force yourself. It’s therapeutic.

We are going to credit the insight to neuroscientific
research, but, in truth, it’s an old song, called: Smile.

Here are some of the lyrics:

Smile
though your heart is aching
Smile even though it's breaking
When there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You'll see the sun come shining through for you

For our further edification, here’s Judy Garland singing it:

The old song knew that you did not have to feel happy to
smile. Smiling when you are miserable and stressed out will make you feel
better. Even if the smile is fake and artificial.

Science has again proved the point. Forcing yourself to
smile will improve your mood. It is not the be-all and end-all to good feelings
and stress reduction, but there is no be-all and end-all to good feelings and
stress reduction.

Yet, it is a positive step that everyone can do, or, should
I say, almost everyone can do it.

Consider this: the best and the most therapeutic smile does
not stop at your mouth. It radiates outward and involves the muscles around
your eyes.

But, what happens if you have numbed your face with Botox or
have had your face stretched and lifted.

These cosmetic procedures impost strict limits on your
ability to contort your face into a smile. If you are bubbling with joy, Botox will bring
you down. If you try to perform the therapeutic exercise, Botox will inhibit
you.

So, the Botox and the lift reduce your ability to feel happiness.
Therefore they will stress you out and make you more miserable.

Like the Icarus of Greek legend wonder boy Jonah Lehrer has
just crashed.

Icarus, you know, tried to fly out of Crete on wings made of
wax and feathers. His father had warned him not to fly too close to the sun,
but he, impetuous youth, ignored his father’s advice. The sun melted his wings
and he drowned in the Aegean Sea.

Formerly, Lehrer had reported for Wired and written columns
for The Wall Street Journal. He authored a best-selling book called Imagine and was recently made a staff
writer at The New Yorker.

And then he was caught making up quotations in his
best-selling book. In Imagine Lehrer
had quoted Bob Dylan saying something that Bob Dylan never said. When
journalist Michael Moynihan asked him about it, Lehrer lied.

When he was found out Lehrer resigned his position at The
New Yorker. His publisher has stopped shipping his book and has pulled the
ebook version.

Thus, one of America’s most promising young journalists
destroyed his career, effectively, for nothing.

I have not read his book, but I would wager that he could
have said whatever he had to say without making up Dylan quotations.

Whatever you think of Bob Dylan the truth is, Dylan is not a
leading authority on aesthetics.

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time that Lehrer was
caught trying to get away with things.

When he became a New Yorker staff writer a few months ago Lehrer
starting writing blog posts for the magazine’s web site.

Within a couple of weeks astute readers discovered that he
was recycling old material, quoting himself at length, in an exercise that one
was tempted to call self-plagiarism.

Perhaps he had run out of things to say. He is a young man, someone whose knowledge must be somewhat
limited. Still, rerunning your old material on The New Yorker site was
unseemly, if not unethical.

Besides, it was The New Yorker, a place where they take such
things extremely seriously.

One does not want to say that Lehrer stole from himself—what
can it mean to steal from yourself?—but clearly he was cutting corners and was
trying to get paid twice for a single piece of work.

Aside from the fact that it was slothful, it was deceptive
and dishonest.

Since Lehrer wrote about matters psychological I have
occasionally commented on his pieces. Links here and here and here and here and
here.

As a rule I found him to be capable but overrated.
He had a flair for popularizing ideas, but his was hardly an authoritative
voice in the world of psychology.

But, then again, he was very young, relatively speaking and
one tended to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But how could a promising young man,
with a very, very bright future before him have done something so utterly
and totally stupid?

Why would he commit an unforced and unnecessary error that
will very likely ruin his career.

One can speculate that there was too large a gap between
what he knew and what people thought he knew. His real talent was, in my view, largely
inferior to the talent that others imagined he had.

Cognitive dissonance, perhaps, between who he was and who
his readers took him to be.

For now Lehrer will no longer be writing for major
publications. He simply cannot be trusted.

Most likely, he will sit down to write a confessional
memoir, explaining how and why he erred, asking for forgiveness.

Addendum:

Reviewing Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine
for The New Republic Isaac Chotiner found that it was far worse than I
imagined. Since Chotiner wrote his review two months ago, it is worth
examining. More so since Chotiner raised issues of intellectual dishonesty and sloppiness.

About Lehrer’s chapter on Bob Dylan,
a fabricated quotation is the least of his problems.

Chotiner writes:

The reason for dwelling at length on Lehrer’s
consideration of Dylan is that almost everything in the chapter—from the minor
details to the larger argument—is inaccurate, misleading, or simplistic.

As for the larger issue of the
quality of Lehrer’s book, Chotiner offers a decidedly negative judgment:

IMAGINE is
really a pop-science book, which these days usually means that it is an
exercise in laboratory-approved self-help. Like Malcolm Gladwell and David
Brooks, Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen
reading it. For this reason, their chestnuts must be roasted in “studies” and
given a scientific gloss. The surrender to brain science is particularly
zeitgeisty. Their sponging off science is what gives these writers the
authority that their readers impute to them, and makes their simplicities seem
very weighty. Of course, Gladwell and Brooks and Lehrer rarely challenge the
findings that they report, not least because they lack the expertise to make
such a challenge.

The
irony of Lehrer’s work, and of the genre as a whole, is that while he takes an
almost worshipful attitude toward specific scientific studies, he is sloppy in
his more factual claims. (In one low moment, he quotes an online poll from Nature magazine to support one
of his arguments.) I am not an expert on brain science, but for Lehrer to quote
a study about the ability of test subjects to answer questions when those
questions were placed on a computer screen with a blue background, and then to
make the life-changing claim that “the color blue can help you double your creative
output,” is laughable. No scientist would accept such an inference.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Many people were shocked. Mitt Romney went to Israel and
declared that Israel owed its success to its superior culture.

Imagine that, a presidential candidate who does not toe the
multicultural line.

In Romney’s words:

As you
come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is
about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the
areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per
capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.

The Washington Post reported:

“And as
I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of
the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few
other things,” Romney said, citing an innovative business climate, the Jewish
history of thriving in difficult circumstances and the “hand of providence.”

In truth, Romney gave the Palestinians more credit than they
deserved.

The Washington Post corrected his facts:

The
economic disparity between the Israelis and the Palestinians is actually much
greater than Romney stated. Israel had a per capita gross domestic product of
about $31,000 in 2011, while the West Bank and Gaza had a per capita GDP of
just over $1,500, according to the World Bank.

With his statement Romney was challenging the Palestinians
to reform their culture and set about the work of building their nation and
economy.

Blaming Israel adds nothing to the per capita GDP.

The dogma of multiculturalism suggests that all cultures are
created equal. If some do better than others they must have stolen and cheated
their neighbors. If all cultures are equal your success must have been
purchased at someone else’s expense.

In the Palestinian territories it’s an article of faith.
Since the Obama administration seems to use it as a guiding principle, the
Palestinians have had no real reason to renounce their illusion that they can gain pride by destroying Israel.

By asking everything of the Israelis and nothing of the
Palestinians, the Obama administration has granted credibility to Islamic
extremists throughout the Middle East.

It helps no one when the American president pretends that a
failed culture has no one to blame but the Israelis.

Palestinians believe that the “occupation” is the only thing
that stands in the way of their having an economy that is as successful as that
of Jordan, where the per capita GDP is $5900.

As soon as Romney spoke a Palestinian spokesman denounced
him as a racist, which is rather rich coming from a group that tirelessly foments anti-Semitism.

Of course, it is easy to distinguish Israeli and Palestinian
cultures. In Israel people take pride in achievement; they take pride in what
they have built. In the Palestinian territories, people take pride in destroying
what others have built.

You do not need any advanced degrees to see that the first culture
will foster success while the latter will promote misery and failure.

Palestinians cannot get over Israel’s success. Unwilling to hurt their delicate feelings, sensitive
souls like Barack Obama pretend that Palestinian culture is just as good as Israel’s. Palestinians understand that their terrorism is justified and that history is on their side.

To be clear,, sabotaging someone else’s accomplishment does
not produce pride; it produces false pride. And false pride, like fools gold,
is not legal tender.

The more false pride you gain the less you can buy with it.
You will have wasted your effort accumulating something that has no recognized
value.

You will then be facing the choice of transforming your
values or doubling down on false pride.

It’s like believing that if your teenaged daughter kisses a
boy or dresses Western she has inflicted such grievous damage on your family
honor that you must immediately murder her.

Obviously, anyone who is that thin skinned has an honor
deficiency to begin with.

Murdering your daughter does not restore your honor; it
gives you a dose of false honor. Outside of your community, in the world’s
eyes, you do not look honorable. You look like a homicidal maniac with neither
pride nor honor.

Anyone who bothered to inform himself about Obamacare knew
that it was not about affordable care. It was about forcing people to be
insured.

But, having insurance does not mean that you will be
receiving medical care. If physicians refuse to take your insurance, as often
happens with Medicaid, your insurance card will gain you access to the
Emergency Room you were previously using for your health care needs.

When the government controls insurance, as in Medicaid and
Medicare, reimbursement rates decline. The more they decline the fewer
physicians accept them.

You thought it was about “affordable care.” It was really
about worsening the already existing doctor shortage.

The New York Times reports:

In the
Inland Empire, an economically depressed region in Southern California,
President Obama’s health care law is
expected to extend insurance coverage to more than 300,000 people by 2014. But
coverage will not necessarily translate into care: Local health experts doubt
there will be enough doctors to meet the area’s needs. There are not enough
now.

As the Times points out with this chart, Obamacare will make
a bad problem worse.

What does it mean to have a doctor shortage? The Times
explains:

Experts
describe a doctor shortage as an “invisible problem.” Patients still get care,
but the process is often slow and difficult. In Riverside, it has left
residents driving long distances to doctors, languishing on waiting lists,
overusing emergency rooms and even forgoing care.

When it comes to Medicaid, don’t take my word for it. Read what
the Times says:

Moreover,
across the country, fewer than half of primary care clinicians were accepting new Medicaid
patients as of 2008, making it hard for the poor to find care even
when they are eligible for Medicaid. The expansion of Medicaid accounts for
more than one-third of the overall growth in coverage in President Obama’s
health care law.

Providers
say they are bracing for the surge of the newly insured into an already
strained system.

Ask yourself this: if the debate about Obamacare had focused
on the doctor shortage instead of affordable care, would public
opinion have been even more opposed than it was? Would the people who have been duped into thinking that they would gain affordable care have been so happy if they had known
that there would not be enough physicians to care for them?

It isn’t an accident that the Times did not report on the
doctor shortage in a timelier manner. It was simply following the Democratic playbook and using deceptive messaging.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

They used to say that the sun never set on the British
Empire. That was then.

Now, Friday evening we watched the sun set on the British
Empire.

In 2008 China hosted the Olympic Games. The opening ceremony
was an extravaganza, a magnificently choreographed spectacle that was designed
to send a clearc message: China had arrived; it was ready to assume its role as
a world leader.

No one expected the opening ceremony in London to match what
the Chinese had done. It could not have; the British did not have the money.

Still, the London ceremony, put together by the director of
a film called Slumdog Millionaire,
sent an entirely different message.

It portrayed Great Britain as hip and cool, all drama,
parties and rock ‘n roll.

The country that gave us Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin now
proclaimed what was left of its pride by placing Paul McCartney and James Bond
in their company.

Making the Queen play a role in a slapstick comedy routine
may have amused the worldwide audience, but still, it bespoke a lack of
seriousness that did neither the nation nor the monarchy much good.

It would have been worthy of Princess Diana, but not QE II.

Director Danny Boyle began his show with Old England, verdant
and pastoral. Then we saw Old England replaced by the billowing smokestacks of
the Industrial Revolution.

Boyle was right to announce that the Industrial Revolution
was the most important and influential event in the past four centuries.

Of course, the Industrial Revolution was not a single event
and does not lend itself to dramatic representation, so we do not often see how
important it was. Credit goes to Boyle for making it his central idea.

Thanks to the Industrial Revolution Britain became a
hegemon, the most wealthy and powerful nation on earth. When Britain faltered
world leadership fell to its most famous colony, America.

Today, British power is a distant memory. Pride in British
achievement seems mostly to live on in a new Nursy state, embodied by the
National Health Service.

Filling the infield at the Olympic stadium with hospital
beds, patients, physicians and nurses made an astonishing statement.

Aside from the leftist political silliness, the extended and
poorly choreographed tribute to the NHS suggested that England was sick and infirm,
needing and receiving medical care.

Britain was telling the world that it is on injured reserve.
It is not ready to compete in the world of commerce; it would prefer to stay in
hospital, licking its wounds.

The British may be intensely proud of their health care
system but the message they sent the world in the Olympic opening ceremony made
them look weak and ineffectual, needing care.

Danny Boyle was also trying to send a message to America. He
was trying to express his support for Obamacare. Why shouldn’t American
enterprise also be crippled by government controls and regulations? If Britain
made a mistake in embracing socialism, why not help America along the same road
to economic ill-health?

In the opening ceremony, Great Britain eventually got up off
of its hospital bed. For what purpose, you might ask. Surely not to get back in
the game or to compete in the arena. Boyle’s England does not function
according to a work ethic.

According to Danny Boyle, a young and healthy Great Britain
would go out and party. After all, isn’t that the meaning of life?

No more work ethic. No more exercising world leadership.
Modern technology has given Britain the chance to get back in touch with its
lost pastoral roots. It has allowed the nation to undo the effects of the
Industrial Revolution in a reactionary exercise in partying. Young Britain was
no longer frolicking in the fields; it was frolicking in the clubs.

In the opening ceremony to the 2012 Olympics Britain was
passing the torch of world leadership.

Was it speaking for America, too?

The Industrial Revolution made Anglo-American culture
dominant in the world. Now that Great Britain is retiring will America continue to represent the Anglosphere or will the torch pass to China.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Where did all the great writing go? We have enough competent
writing; we have enough good and very good writing. What’s missing is great
writing.

According to Roger Rosenblatt we have, for a century or so,
been suffering a deficiency of great writing. Has any novelist in the past
century matched Jane Austen or Henry James?

One might say that Proust and Thomas Mann are great writers, but I think
that Rosenblatt is limiting himself to the English language.

Take Ulysses, by
James Joyce. We have all been told that it’s a great book, a virtuoso writing
performance. If anyone asks you to name the greatest English language novel of
the twentieth century you would probably cite it.

Then again, have you read it? I would venture that you haven’t.
I have. For reasons that defy reason, I have read it more than once.

Despite what everyone thinks and what we have all been
trained to believe, it is not a great book.

It isn’t interesting; it isn’t engaging; it doesn’t really
address any great questions. If you have not been forced to read it for an
English course you will never pick it.

The fact that authorities tried to censor it does not make
it a great book.

Rosenblatt compares it to the original, Homer’s Odyssey, and states that it does not compare.

To the point where you start asking yourself why Joyce would
have invited comparison with a book that was so far superior to anything he
could write himself.

Rosenblatt explains his idea:

When I
start thinking this way, I wonder if I’m just growing old, and tired of
modernity. Yet even when modernity was young, I was dazzled more often by
clarity than by calculated difficulty, and pleased simply by someone doing a
far, far better thing. It is always thus. Whatever brief delights it provides,
mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when
we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before
his eyes.

Ulysses is a
virtuoso performance. Yet, Rosenblatt is correct; it feels more like a
contrivance than an illuminating work of fiction. You might say that it tells a story, but it would be more accurate that it refers to an epic that tells a story.

Joyce does not much care about his readers. He does not much
care about reaching them or moving them. He has indulged his own taste for “calculated
difficulty” but that, in itself, does not make him a great writer.

It makes him barely readable. But even that did not suffice
James Joyce. With Finnegans Wake he
wrote a book that is completely unreadable.

Rosenblatt is contending that in Ulysses Joyce has little to
nothing to say that is very interesting. It is all so self-absorbed,
self-indulgent, show-offy that it does not engage the reader, does not make us care about the characters, and does not achieve greatness.

I think it fair to say that Joyce was trying to be great. Perhaps, he was trying too hard.

It’s like an athlete who is so full of himself that he takes
his eye off the ball. Or who thinks that it’s all about him.

An artist whose sole message is: look at me, look at how
smart I am, look at what I can do… will bore you to tears.

More recently, a novelist named Jonathan Franzen has been
proclaimed one of our great novelists. For my part I find his books boring,
tedious, and uninteresting. I recognize that Franzen writes good sentences, but
compared to another writer whose greatness Ronsenblatt properly extols, Charles
Dickens, Franzen is a pompous mediocrity, a triumph of marketing, a testimony
to the gullibility of the reading public.

Great writers don’t show off. They move their readers. They
present characters we care about facing dilemmas that are familiar.

Great writers do not indulge their impulse toward
self-expression. As Rosenblatt puts it, they tell us something worth knowing.

Modernist writers, of the kind that Rosenblatt is criticizing,
are merely trying to provide an aesthetic experience, a perfectly beautiful
object whose sole value is aesthetic.

Art for the sake of art has become, in Rosenblatt’s words, weirdness
for the sake of weirdness. As I see it, these writers are lazy and slothful.

Great writers work very, very hard. They do not take
shortcuts. They do not try to compensate for their inability to tell a story by
throwing in weird events or twists.

If the plot does not work a great writer will redo it until
it works. A mediocre writer will let an incoherent plot lay there like a
beached whale. Once his books get picked up by literature courses dutiful
students will be incited to do his work for him, to reveal the meaning hidden behind the writer's sloppiness.

Yesterday, we discovered that, prior to opening fire in a
crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado James Holmes had consulted with a
psychiatrist. Link here.

He had been a patient of Dr. Lynne Fenton, director of
mental health services at the University of Colorado, and a specialist in
schizophrenia.

Whatever the value of this information for Holmes’ defense
attorneys, it tells us that Holmes was aware of what was happening to him and
had sought help for his condition.

I suggested previously that his interest in cognitive
neuroscience, especially his work on the biological causes of mental illness,
suggested that he suspected, at the very least, that he was suffering from an
organic brain disease.

Perhaps, his fellow students and teachers in the
neuroscience program could not have known of his illness, but, shouldn’t we
expect more from a credentialed professional?

As of now we have more questions than answers.

We assume that Holmes consulted with Dr. Fenton voluntarily,
but we do not know how often. We do not know whether she had arrived at a
diagnosis. We do not know whether she prescribed medication for him and whether
or not he had taken it.

We are obliged to assume that if she had recognized the
danger he posed she would have taken action, at least by reporting him to the
proper authorities.

A specialist in schizophrenia should, in my view, easily be
able to recognize someone who is undergoing a schizophrenic breakdown. If Holmes was seeking help voluntarily, he would have been less likely to be trying to
hide what was happening to him. Since he had a research interest in organic brain disease he would have been likely to speak openly to someone he might have identified as a colleague.

Dr. Fenton might not have known that the breakdown would
manifest itself in a massacre, but she should know that such a breakdown would
very likely prove dangerous to the patient or others.

Now, we know that Holmes sent Dr. Fenton a "warning package" of
materials describing what he was planning to do. He sent it a week before he
opened fire.

Tragically, the package got lost in a mail room. If Holmes was
trying to reach out to someone who might stop him… at a time when he knew he
could not stop himself… he failed.

We do not know whether the package contained a record of
what Holmes had told Dr. Fenton or what he had not told Dr. Fenton. If he had
told Dr. Fenton of his plans and she had not taken them seriously, he might
have wanted to send the package to convince her to do something.

We must assume that Holmes did not consult with Fenton in
the week leading up to the massacre.

Ironically, the University had in place a group of
professionals whose job was to identify at risk mentally ill students.

The Washington Post reports that this group has had some
success, but that it missed James Holmes.

It reports:

After
the 2007 mass shooting that left 33 dead at Virginia Tech, the University of
Colorado set up a special team to spot students who were suicidal or might pose
a threat to others. There is no indication that the team — made up of
mental-health professionals, campus police and others — had identified Holmes
as a student in need of monitoring.

Friday, July 27, 2012

The Chick-fil-A kerfuffle was provoked when Boston Mayor Tom
Menino said that he would block the chain from opening a restaurant in Boston.

Like Rahm Emanuel after him, Menino insisted that
Chick-fil-A did not respect Boston values because its president thought that
marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Now, the Boston Herald reports that the same Mayor Menino
has given city land to a mosque even though one of its “spiritual guides”has
repeatedly called for homosexuals to be executed.

Given
his stance on Chick-fil-A, would Mayor Tom Menino grant permits to a group that
has counted among its leaders a man who has repeatedly called homosexuality a
“crime that must be punished” by death?

Actually,
he has done that...and more! Menino effectively gave away city land valued at $1.8
million to the organization, and he gave a speech at its ribbon-cutting
ceremony.

It’s
the Islamic Society of Boston’s mosque, and when it comes to anti-gay
sentiment, one of its early supporters makes Chick-fil-A look like the
Provincetown Men’s Chorus.

It’s not a new story:

During
the (understandable) controversy over the city selling land for a house of
worship at a below-market rate a decade ago, reporters discovered that the Islamic
Society of Boston counted imam Yusef al-Qaradawi as one of its spiritual guides.

Yusef al-Qadawari has
this to say about homosexuals:

[A
homosexual should be given] the same punishment as any sexual pervert...
Some say we should throw them from a high place, like God did with the people
of Sodom. Some say we should burn them.

I take it for granted that the gay rights movement has been
out front denouncing this depraved imam. Right?

People cheat all the time. They cheat on their lovers; they
cheat on their spouses; sometimes, they even cheat on themselves.

To coin a phrase, today infidelity is as American as apple pie.

Most of the time it’s the man who cheats, but, increasingly
women are joining the club.

No one was surprised to find out that Ashton was cheating on
Demi, but a lot of people were shocked to learn that Kristen Stewart was
cheating on Robert Pattinson.

Few people were surprised to read that Pattinson has since
moved out of the home that they shared.

Yesterday, I remarked on Jessica Coen’s view that cheating
is not such a bad thing, that’s it’s normal for a young girl, and that Kristen
Stewart should not have apologized... except maybe to Pattinson.

I found Coen’s column dispiriting, for the message it was
sending to young women, and, by extension, to young men.

This morning I discovered an excellent article by LeslieLoftis, explaining how it could have happened that Stewart cheated on
Pattinson.

Strangely, Coen and Loftis see the same value system at
work. Coen is trafficking the values
that the culture imposes on young women; Loftis is critiquing them, by showing
what happens when women follow them.

Specifically, young American women are being told that, whatever they do,
they should not marry young.

I have often criticized this piece of life-altering bad
advice. Loftis renders us a service by showing how this idea infiltrates the
minds and lives of young women.

Several decades ago young women were told that they should
postpone marriage in favor of career advancement. In the case of Kristen
Stewart that is clearly not the case.

Loftis describes the way this message is communicated to girls
and young women:

These
days, we tell teens that their 20s are for living their life, doing their own
thing, experimenting, experiencing. So if a girl meets Mr. Wonderful in her
early 20s, when things turn to serious talks about marriage and children, she
freaks out. Her friends, her sisters, sometimes her mother — they have told her
it is too soon. If she goes so far as to get engaged, we women stage
interventions. Granted, sometimes marriage is too soon. Other times the couple
isn’t a good match. But we don’t typically weigh the relationships with a
little discounting of the judgment of a younger woman. We take her youth as the
decisive factor.

In so
doing, we create the very immaturity we use as evidence of their immaturity.

In truth, this is what worldly wise 32 year old Jessica Coen
was telling young women when she said that Stewart’s behavior was wrong but
understandable.

What else could it mean when Coen condescended to Stewart by
calling her a “stupid girl.”

By most
accounts, Stewart, 22, has had only two boyfriends. She’s been with Pattinson
for about three years. They live together. Rumor has it they’ve been talking
about marriage and children. I can guarantee that she has women she trusts
telling her that she needs to do more before she settles down. That she has
already done more in her career and traveled more around the world than most
women ever do doesn’t matter. “You are only 22. You’re too young to
settle down,” is what the little devil on her shoulder whispers during
conversations about commitment or when she feels a connection with an older and
supposedly wiser man. Thus, the freak-out.

By the
time a woman is out of her 20s, she has seen the freak-out often. It takes many
forms: a sudden breakup, a party binge, a fling — or three. Mixing the party
binge with flings is particularly explosive — a drunk woman putting out signals
that she wants a good time. The lucky women are those who end up merely
embarrassed. Stewart went the fling route.

Peer pressure against early marriage is producing such freak
outs. It is seductive and powerful.

Loftis knows, as we all do, that sometimes a twenty-year old
women finds Mr. Wrong, but that sometimes she finds Mr. Right.

Clearly, she should use her own judgment, with an assist
from those who love her the most. But she should not throw away someone she loves and could marry because her
girlfriends and the ambient culture have told her that she is too young and sexually inexperienced.

Loftis writes:

But
don’t throw away something good simply because your 20s are supposed to be
about you. That is the start of a very lonely trail. Go read the testaments of
35-year-old women. Almost invariably, they have one that got away. The “I’m not
ready freak out” is why.

She is right to say that the culture tells young people that
their twenties should be about “me.” It tells young people that after college
they should go out and try to find themselves.

That can only mean that young people are being told to turn
their twenties into a therapeutic journey toward self-actualization.

But, will all of those years of self-involvement and repeated
relationship errors will make you a better and more desirable spouse? Or will
they make you narcissistically self-absorbed to the point where you can barely
make a good decision about mating and marriage?

When Rahm Emanuel returned to Chicago after his stint as
White House Chief of Staff, he was welcomed as a conquering hero.

There was a new sheriff in town.

The city’s gangbangers were thrilled. They threw a party and
turned Emanuel’s city into a shooting gallery. Gun violence in Chicago soared.

Perhaps they saw him as a community organizer. Perhaps they
saw him as a man who would feel their pain. They certainly saw weakness that was ripe for exploiting.

Mayor Rahm could only respond with the usual liberal pieties.
In a city that had some of the most stringent gun control laws in the nation he
announced that gun control laws would control the violence.

Rahm’s Chicago values allow him to embrace one of the nation’s
most virulent anti-Semites. And they allow him to provide official sanction for an operation that will proselytize the thought
of Louis Farrakhan and will recruit young people
into the Nation of Islam.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

It’s a sad day when young people take their moral cues from
the behavior of celebrities, but, alas, it’s happening in America today.

Yesterday, a website published pictures of celebrity Kristen
Stewart cheating on her live-in boyfriend, celebrity Robert Pattinson. Stewart and
Pattinson star in a series of enormously popular vampire movies about Twilight.

In the pictures, Stewart was wrapped in an amorous embrace with film director
and married father of two, Rupert Sanders. He had recently directed her in a
movie about Snow White.

Since Stewart is extremely famous and recognizable she could
not have just gone and gotten a room. Of course, making out in public did not exactly
solve the discretion issue.

Us
Weekly reported that Kristen left the Hollywood home she shares with Rob on
July 17 and spent the afternoon driving around LA with Sanders — who’s wed to
British model Liberty Ross — “in search of secluded places to
make out.” They were pictured kissing in a car and later canoodling and hugging
at a park in what was described as a “marathon make-out session.”

Apparently,
Pattinson had already known about the escapade and was deeply humiliated by it
all… to say the least.

After the pictures appeared, Stewart issued a contrite
apology via a representative:

I'm
deeply sorry for the hurt and embarrassment I've caused to those close to me
and everyone this has affected. This momentary indiscretion has jeopardized the
most important thing in my life, the person I love and respect the most, Rob. I
love him, I love him, I'm so sorry.

To which Jessica Coen has responded by saying that Stewart erred in
apologizing. She does not, Coen said, owe anyone a press release.

In some part, Coen is right. When you allow someone else to apologize
in your place, you have not, by definition, apologized.

If Stewart had gone before a camera and read the statement,
I would have thought better of her. She would have been closer to a real apology.

As you probably know, Jessica Coen is an extremely talented
young writer and editor. She edits Jezebel, an excellent site.

Now, Coen wants people to believe that Stewart should not
have apologized at all, except to her live-in boyfriend, Pattinson.

Coen senses, correctly, that celebrity apologies are
especially vacuous. If you make a living, as Stewart does, pretending to be
someone you are not, any statement of apology, no matter how anguished, is
going to smack of insincerity.

When you allow a representative to deliver the statement,
you might just as well, Coen reasons, not have done it at all.

Worse yet, in the moral universe of celebrity the apology is
normally not accompanied by a price paid. When someone apologizes sincerely he
usually accepts a penalty; he resigns his position or withdraws from public
life for a decent interval.

In Stewart’s case, the apology, Coen explains, is intended
to protect the franchise. Apparently, the Twilight franchise is very lucrative,
indeed, and publicists are working hard to protect it.

If that is the primary concern, then apology can only be insincere.

And yet, how many young people are going to draw moral
lessons from this debacle? How many of them will learn that if your apology is
not sincere you would do better not to offer it at all? How many of them will
learn that, while Stewart did something that was, in Coen’s word, "wrong," we
should take into account the extenuating circumstances and not, she implies, be
so judgmental.

This incident raises a number of important
moral issues.

First, if an apology is not sincere should it be offered
anyway? If you do not mean it, should you say it? Or better, should you do the
right thing when your heart is not in it?

Take a less charged example: should you send a thank-you
note when you do not feel grateful? Ought you to write out the note when you do
not feel the feeling you are expressing?

Coen seems to be saying that you should not; Confucius said
you should.

Confucius would have advised you to perform correct social
rituals, even if your heart is not in it. By his thinking, the more you do the
right thing the more you will understand what it the ritual means and the more
your gestures will become sincere.

Or, if I may quote myself, I once put it this way:

If you
want to build character, it’s better to pretend that you have it than to prove
that you don’t.

The words that were released under Kristen Stewart’s name do
express a high level of anguish. That they do not rise to the level of a
sincere apology means simply that Stewart has something to work towards.

The second point is: if an apology is larded over with
explanations justifying the failure or mistake, then it is, by definition,
insincere.

The same, I suggest, applies to Coen’s tactic of denouncing Stewart
for having done something wrong while at the same time offering a laundry list
of extenuating circumstances.

In these paragraphs Coen piles on the rationalizations for
Stewart’s behavior:

This is
the matter of a girl cheating on her boyfriend, and that kind of feels like a
high school fuck up. Fodder for the gossip mill, sure, but not at the level of
publicly begging for forgiveness. Even the overwrought apology (your boyfriend
is "the most important thing in my life" — really?) sounds like a kid
with a case of the swoons.

Kristen
Stewart is 22, a very young adult. Find me one person who didn't screw up, in
ways large or small, a relationship at that age. And Robert Pattinson is just
her boyfriend, as in they aren't married.… Moreover,
Stewart exists in a very permissive Hollywood bubble where celebrities can
generally behave however they please, and she didn't violate the sanctity of
some social/legal contract. Nor was she involved in any criminal acts (as far
as we know, anyhow, but there could've been some hot Bonnie and Clyde role
playing); adultery isn't illegal in California. And who the hell knows the
state of her relationship?

It is easy to imagine that young women reading this advice
will conclude that cheating on your boyfriend is not all that wrong.

But, cheating is one thing. Humiliating your boyfriend or significant other in public is quite another.

Coen grants that Stewart owes Pattinson an apology, but we
should consider the fact that once you have humiliated your live-in boyfriend
in public, a private apology will no longer suffice.

Moreover, Stewart damaged her public reputation. She ought to work to restore her good name. If she apologizes she is saying that the indiscretion was a mistake,
that it was not characteristic of her, and that it will not happen again.

But she also damaged her boyfriend’s reputation, making him
look, in the eyes of the world, like the unmarried equivalent of a cuckold.

After offering all the excuses she can think of for Stewart’s
behavior, Coen says that Stewart’s behavior is not excusable.

In Coen’s words:

None of
this makes Stewart's behavior even remotely excusable because it's not, not
even if the relationship is on the rocks or he's the world's most popular
vampire. Say it with me: Cheating is wrong! Kristen Stewart Did a Bad Thing.
She acted like a crappy person. But she did it to her boyfriend, and she's
young, and chances are she's learned her lesson. Assuming Pattinson and
Stewart's relationship was in an otherwise happy place full of hearts doodled
on notebooks, she certainly does owe him an apology. She doesn't, however, owe
him — or any of us — a press release. Stupid girl did something stupid. The
end.

Since when are 22 year olds considered to be girls. Last I
heard they were women, adults with a sense of moral responsibility.

A stupid girl she does not bear the same moral
responsibility as an adult cohabiting with another adult.

Since Stewart is an adult and a public figure, she owed
Pattinson an apology. But she also owed her public an apology, however insincere.

She would have done better to have offered the apology in public,
in her own words and in her own voice.

She has, I daresay, room for improvement. But that does not
meant that she should not have apologized or that we should excuse her behavior
on the grounds that she is “very young.”

After all, what is the message going out to young people here. Why would a young man ever want to have a
girlfriend if he knew in advance that she could cheat on him with relative
impunity because they were not married? And why would he not read Jessica Coen
and say to himself that if those are the rules of the game, then he has the right to cheat himself?

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Seek out
marital advice from people whose marriages had failed.

It sounds like asking Julia Allison for some pointers about
dating.

There's something wrong with a culture that seeks how-to advice from people who don't know how to.

Most researchers look at successful marriages. It makes a
lot of sense. Psychologist Terry Orbuch has chosen the opposite tack. She believes
that divorcees have spent more time obsessing over failure, and thus, that they
will be especially good at giving advice.

People
who lose the most important relationship of their life tend to spend some time
thinking about what went wrong. If they are at all self-reflective, this means
they will acknowledge their own mistakes, not just their ex's blunders. And if
they want to be lucky in love next time, they'll try to learn from these
mistakes.

Of course, people who are introspective, self-absorbed and
self-critical are, by definition, more likely to end up divorced.

People who know what went wrong and who swear never to make
the same mistake again often end up making different mistakes.

Perfecting the art of introspective self-criticism gets them
caught up in a feedback loop, between mistakes and self-critical
self-awareness.

Nothing about the process helps you to develop the good
habits that are the basis for a successful marriage.

As might be imagined, Orbuch’s divorcees say what a
psychologist would want them to say. They advise talking things over, expressing
your feelings, being open, honest and supportive.

While wallowing in therapy culture pieties, the study does
not say how the divorced couples defined their roles. Did they see themselves
as husband and wife in the more traditional sense or did they see themselves as
equal persons?

We know nothing about who was playing which roles, and have
no information about any couple’s financial condition.

Orbuch’s advice is wrong and wrongheaded because it suggests
that a marriage can be made to work.

True enough, marriage requires work and adjustment. But you
cannot force it to work when other factors are militating against it.

If you want to know what makes a marriage work, begin with
the most important fact: whom you choose to marry. If you choose the wrong
person, you are not going to make it work by rearranging your mental furniture
and showering your spouse with empathy.

Over at the Hooking Up Smart blog, Susan Walsh has offered a
good list of questions you should ask yourself when you are choosing a mate.

If I had to limit myself to three qualities that are most
important in a successful marriage, I would begin with character.

If your beloved has bad character, if he or she is
unreliable and cannot be trusted, if he or she evinces disloyalty… you are
going to have more drama than harmony, and ultimately a less successful marriage.

How do you judge character? Try asking your friends and
family.

If none of the people who love you the most likes your
intended, then it is likely that your love has blinded you to the person’s
character flaws.

Marriage is a social institution. When you marry someone you
make that person a part of your family and a part of your circle of friends.

If you choose someone whose bad character alienates these
people marriage will cost you your social moorings.

Good communication will not compensate for the ensuing
problems.

Serious sociological studies have shown that the second most
important predictor of a happy marriage is: coming from the same or a similar
culture.

You do not need to think the same thoughts, have the same
feelings or have the same interests. You are not going to be happy if you marry
an echo chamber.

It does mean that you should have a great deal in common,
culturally. If you come from radically different cultural backgrounds you will find
that the social cues that mean one thing in one culture mean something else in
someone else’s culture.

It may be the case that you will feel a stronger emotional connection
to someone who comes from a different world, but that just means that your
emotions are compensating for your inability to understand the signals you are
sending each other.

The further apart you are culturally, the more you will have
to explain yourself all the time.

People who come from radically different worlds often
exhaust themselves trying to bridge their culture gap with words and feelings.

With marriage and with any romantic relationship the less
you have to explain yourself the better off you will be.

Finally, marriages fail because no one knows what marriage
is any more. People have come to believe that marriage expresses true love and
involves an emotional affinity, as in soul mating.

If you want a happy and long lasting marriage you will to
rely less of feeling and more on consistent routines. The more harmonious your
household, the better your marriage.

Talking about why you can’t get along does not help you to
get along. It exacerbates the tensions by accentuating the points of conflict.